"All Night Long" takes "Othello" and transposes it to a jazz setting in contemporary London, or at least the London of the early sixties. It's a great idea, has a terrific cast and how could any jazz aficianado not like any movie that features this much jazz and a cast that includes Charlie Mingus, Johnny Dankworth and Dave Brubeck all playing themselves but there is a but... In place of Shakespeare we get jive and nothing dates as badly as the kind of hip dialogue that jazz musicians are reputed to have used back then. Cool just isn't cool anymore.

On the plus side, it's a Basil Dearden picture so as well as great jazz, and lots of it, we also get intelligence. Dearden knows the pedigree he has here and treats it with due respect and Patrick McGoohan is superb as the Iago figure. Others in the cast include Richard Attenborough, Betsy Blair, Keith Michell and in the Othello/Desdemona roles, Paul Harris and Marti Stevens. Unfortunately Harris and Stevens are the weakest things about the film; their lack of acting experience shows.

It is, however, a brilliant looking picture. Producer Michael Relph designed it along with Art Director Ray Sim and Edward Scaife supplied the superb black and white cinematography and, as I said, the jazz is terrific. However, it wasn't really successful and is among the least revived of all the Dearden/Relph movies but it's certainly worth seeking out and if you love jazz it is simply unmissable.

There will be three camps of people who watch this and choose to analyze it. Those who have seen Shakespeare's "Othello" and are curious to see how it has been updated, those who have no interest in seeing "Othello", and those like me who have not yet seen any variation of that play (one of the few Shakespeare's I have not viewed) and plan to. Then there is another camp, students of jazz who find out about this in their research and decide to spend 90 minutes at a London jam session and chill out as the action unfolds in the same setting.

The world of music through an all night party becomes the setting for the scheming of several members of the jazz community who scheme against long time friend Paul Harris and his wife Marti Stevens, a retired band singer they desperately want to go on tour with them, knowing that this would lead to the end of their marriage. Patrick McGoohan and Richard Attenborough bring out their best calculating schemers to make it appear through altered tapes that Stevens is cheating on Harris, and this could easily backfire on them, leading to tragedy.

Don't let the single setting keep you from getting into this combination of classic Shakespeare and gloomy melodrama, greatly enlivened by some terrific music and a few numbers sung by Stevens. The cast also includes "Marty's" Betsy Blair in another terrific characterization as a married woman trapped by unhappiness but in denial of how miserable she is. I know now that I'll be revisiting this as soon as I see Shakespeare's play. This is one of the first variations outside of musical theater to bring the Bard to a modern audience, and it's an instant classic.

The film, based on Othello, is neatly positioned as a vehicle to showcase some of the best Jazz musicians of the period -- including Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus.

What is most interesting about this film is how it handles racial relations. That was an important part of "Othello", but really defined the 1960s. I love how 1963 was the year of the "I Have a Dream" speech, but already in England films like this had blacks and whites mingling without any sort of trouble. How much more mature they were...

The film was released by The Criterion Collection in January 2011, and it deserved to be. Criterion has done a great job of finding lost classics and cleaning them up -- the beautiful black and white cinematography deserves to be seen, and the jazz soundtrack deserves to be heard.